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FILM REVIEW; Voices From a War-Ravaged Country

The modest 61-minute video documentary ''Afghan Stories'' is a subjective response to world events by its maker, Taran Davies, an investment banker who resigned a week after Sept. 11 and left for Afghanistan a few weeks later. He took his video camera and a friend, Walied Osman, a Queens-born American of Afghan descent who would act as interpreter and adviser (and who also has a producer's credit).

One fears the sort of journalistically dubious, polemical documentary made popular by Nick Broomfield (''Biggie and Tupac'') and Michael Moore (''Bowling for Columbine''). Instead this is a thoughtful, personal account of a single voyage through a violent region that does not pretend to have the answers or even a political ax to grind. The film seems invaluable for its nonprofessional, ground-level approach to the Afghan conflict. Mr. Davies does not try to manufacture sensational scoops or the heart-tugging human-interest stories that have become the staple of television news. He uses his camera more humanely, to look at the effects of the war and to listen to the people affected.

The journey begins in Tajikistan, where Mr. Davies and Mr. Osman move into the home of an Afghan refugee (and his large family) while waiting for their Afghan visas. The portrait of loss is moving: here is an upper-middle-class, educated family (the wife is a doctor, something the Taliban would never permit) whose members are suddenly uprooted from their lives and dashed down in a place where they are resented and suspect. Depression pervades the modest household, where the father sits distractedly strumming his oud for lack of anything better to do.

Visas received, the filmmakers head to Afghanistan aboard a cargo plane belonging to the Northern Alliance -- rebels who fought with the United States against the Taliban -- and flown by a visibly drunken pilot. Safely on the ground, they accept the hospitality of a local elder, Hadji Ahmed Shamsadin, who with his son Zia takes the filmmakers on a tour of the rocky countryside, devastated by 24 years of constant warfare.

A final trip takes Mr. Davies and Mr. Osman to Shar-i-Buzurg, a remote village where Najib Najibullah, a representative of the United Nations World Food Program, uses some world-class diplomacy to try to persuade a baby-faced local warlord to let him do his job. A planned triumphant finale -- Mr. Davies and Mr. Osman will be the first to ride on a road newly built by the villagers, a scene that would have been the perfect kicker for a CNN report -- falls authentically flat when the poorly built road proves impassable.

The film's view of Afghanistan offers no simple solutions to a complex situation, one that does not seem to have significantly improved since the Taliban's defeat, if the reports coming from that now largely forgotten country are accurate. Nor should it. The answers are in the eyes of the battered Afghan people, and with their cloud of fear and uncertainty -- and brutality, too, in some cases -- they are not at all easy to read.

Produced and directed by Taran Davies; in English with some subtitled Pashto and Turkmen; Walied Osman, co-producer; director of photography, Mr. Davies; edited by Penelope Falk; music by Andre Fratto, performed by Aziz Herawi; released by Seventh Art Releasing. Running time: 61 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown with an eight-minute film, Robert Edwards's ''Voice of the Prophet.'' At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village.